The Great Operating System Games 145
harrymcc writes "For decades, the simple little games that come with operating systems have been some of the most-used software on the planet. Legendary geeks such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Herzfeld have tried their hands at writing them. And yet they get no respect — or, actually, attention of any kind. Technologizer's Benj Edwards aimed to rectify that with a look at forty years' worth of bundled OS games, from 1971 Unix text-based ones to Woz's Little Brick Out to such Windows mainstays as Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Reversi." Article is an annoyingly long slide show (would it kill people to put a reasonable amount of content on pages?) but there's some fun stuff in there.
Solitaire (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, good old solitaire. That last time I remember playing that game it was on a 386 running Windows 3.1. People still seem to love it though. 2 weeks ago I was browsing around in a pawn shop and someone was looking at a laptop computer running Vista. Was that a problem for him? Nope, but for whatever reason they couldn't find Solitaire (don't know if the link was missing or it had been removed - or if they just couldn't find it - I wasn't looking, just overheard the conversation). The customer was all sorts of pissed. "When you buy a computer it ought to AT LEAST come with Solitaire. What kind of stuff are ya'll selling in here?". Just struck me as funny. Guess he didn't know that on any Windows system even if it has been removed it can be added right back in - or that if you REALLY got desperate Solitaire is one of the most commonly available cloned games out there.
I never liked... (Score:4, Funny)
The Windows game "Where the hell is my file?", or wait, was that a game?
Text adventure (Score:5, Funny)
I used to have this weird text adventure for my old 386. I think it was for Windows 3.1. It'd be all black with these words on it, it was some sort of scary cyberpunk hacking game where you had to investigate files and navigate a directory structure. There was a strange cheat left in it though (was it a beta?): if you simply instructed your character to 'win' (by running WIN.EXE), you'd win right there and then, the game would exit and take you back to Windows!
Weird, huh?
Those were the days... (Score:5, Funny)
When I first got Red Hat I spent many hours playing 'make-sound-work-in-KDE' :)
Dial Up Remote Games? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Those were the days... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dial Up Remote Games? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Text adventure (Score:5, Funny)
It sounds like you had the shareware. /autotest /q?
have you tried format c:
this registers the game and then you don't return to windows so quickly
Re:Ski-Free (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong Version, Bro (Score:5, Funny)